Comments on: Bill Nye, the Microsoft C 6 guy

By: neozeed

neozeed — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 08:39:03 +0000

In reply to Malcolm. I have to try the older Microsoft C 386 compilers and their ability to output assembly. I had no real luck on other setups, but maybe this one will let me build stuff for OS/2

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 17:06:09 +0000

In reply to Malcolm.

I recently bought a copy of MASM 6.0 on eBay and got a chance to try this out. It’s not quite as nice as C 6 (no OS/2 C runtime library) but is still designed to run on and target OS/2.

One thing I tried was using MASM 6.0 to supply startup code, then calling main() provided by Visual C++ 1.5, which worked fine. Even the Visual C++ linker supported generating OS/2 NE binaries, it just defaults to Windows and needs to be explicitly told via “EXETYPE OS2”. The linker can link to OS/2 import libraries, it just needs header definitions. MASM doesn’t provide .h files, but does include .inc files which must be perfectly translatable (they’re just describing the calling convention.)

Unrelated, but there’s a lot of interesting capabilities with MASM 6.0. There’s an important 6.0b update which added support for stdcall, where that capability was clearly done to support Win32. There’s a KB article about using it, although it tells people to use cvtomf which didn’t exist in the released SDK. KB articles show how to use 6.0b for 32 bit OS/2 via OS/2 2.0’s link386 and doscalls.lib too, and that part actually works. For some reason doscalls.lib was removed from Warp so doing this requires OS/2 2.x.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 22:00:19 +0000

In reply to Richard Wells. That pretty much matches what I recall where building things like hack needed you to use 5.1 for some parts as it would either crash the compiler or generate garbage. I thought Quick C for Windows was also based on MSC 6, but I am pretty sure I've had better luck with it. And of course, it running in protected mode was always a bonus!

By: Richard Wells

Richard Wells — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 20:22:25 +0000

The optimizer in C6 was badly broken. Debugging a program becomes a lot harder when the output of the compiler does not match what the source code should result in.

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 15:03:05 +0000

> C/C++ 7.0…removed targeting OS/2…I never tried to see if it could be paired with the OS/2 SDK, and manually made to generate OS/2 executables. I suspect not.

I don’t have an OS/2 SDK to try this on, but I suspect it’ll be straightforward. Visual C++ was bundled with a demo version of Phar Lap, and compiling for it means compiling an OS/2 binary. It’s actually hard to target Win16 and not 16 bit OS/2 since they have the same executable format. So it’s clear that the vast bulk of support must be there, and any restriction would be fairly contrived/artificial.

Last time we spoke about this: https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/05/17/a-weird-ebay-interlude-on-the-way-to-extending-dos/#comment-272241